On some problems I have with certain beings in this world

The obligatory image is a postcard ad that I received in the mail with the books that I ordered (see the end of this entry for details); it is unedited, other than obscuring the face of the deceased.

Dear diary,

Our hometown’s “feathered friends” are becoming insufferable:

In my country, in early spring, the sun begins to rise before the night is even finished. When this happens, all the birds surrounding our house go totally bonkers. And our windows are thin and leaky, so the outside noise barges in and rudely affronts us, when we’re trying to sleep. From just a few hours after midnight until the actual morning blooms, we’re surrounded by birdsong: insistently glittering chitter-chatter, at a very high volume. It sounds like a glass chandelier in its death throes.

And consider that these birds are not even elected by We the People; and their reign super·spans entire presidential administrations.

What happened is that the monied bosses of the Toil Party installed bird·kind (against public opinion) as the running mate of longtime winner Orpheus, for they knew that Orpheus was soon to be torn in tatters, thus rendering him unable to finish his term.

Sure enough, Orpheus got sparagmos’d in the woods, and the birds rose to power. The first thing they did was sign into fate the Avian Menace (A.M.), an agency that does not answer to human sleepers. The A.M.'s members are dictatorially appointed rather than subject to democratic vote; and their chirping is incessant: to this day, the bedrooms of Thief River Falls are plagued by their uproar.

*

Yet are ducks even birds? — I only ask because, this morning, amid that feathered orchestra’s anti-symphony, there was ONE noticeably louder noise of belligerence, marking its own slow time among the rest of the hubbub, and it would not relent. The birds collectively were like a zillion tingling triangles; but, all the while, repeatedly, like a merchant barking his wares, was the voice of this duck: WAAH… WAAH… WAAH… WAAH… (apparently attempting to wail the English word quack.)

What’s our world coming to? These little animals are out of control. If we don’t do something immediately to bridle their pollution of our audio environment, we may never again get any peace and quiet. Science Itself tells me that we have only twelve, or, at most, fifteen spans of time to enjoy before Earth’s atmosphere is dominated by irksome birdsong. Think about that: Do you want your grandchildren inheriting a world where they can’t even listen to a newscaster read to them a report concerning their own government’s agencies secretly slaughtering civilian multitudes, without the tweets and chirps and cock-a-doodle-doos of literally bird-brained liquishitters (for they shit only liquid; that is, excepting the larger waterfowl such as ducks, geese, and swans — but there’s legislation underway that would rechristen these latter nuisances “honkflesh” rather than birds, on account of their trump, in contradistinction from their non-aquatic cronies whose excretions are perma-soft) sustaining a cacophony as sonic backdrop?

And I hate my boss. (I know I’m supposed to be writing an op-ed piece against the birds, but I’m a little preoccupied.) Now, when I say “I hate my boss,” I don’t mean that I wish that my boss were no longer my supervisor but rather my own underling. I’m not THAT cruel: I wouldn’t wish the state of employee-hood on my worst enemy (and I pretty much just proved this an instant ago, as my worst enemy happens to be my boss). I just mean that I dislike talking to my boss, because my boss doesn’t listen. He always wants to discuss the events of our world, and he loves to grandstand about politics, but whenever I answer his fallacious claims with the Truth, he just changes the subject. And he never says “I’m sorry, Bryan; I was wrong, and you are right.”

I know that the pro-capitalism hardliners in my readership will wince when I say this, but my boss’s way of treating me makes the ideas of the system of communism sound appealing. And when I say “communism” of course I mean my own misunderstanding of that term. I take it as referring to a directly democratic government BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE which operates in accordance with the principle “from each according to ability; to each according to need”. In other words, when my boss treats me unfairly (by which I mean that he does not agree with my argument — he even goes so far as to refuse to admit that he’s converted to my political belief; and sometimes I suspect that he’s secretly refusing to convert to my belief, as if my stance and arguments did not persuade him) it’s appealing to consider a world where the basic needs of ALL people are simply met: no questions asked, no hidden charges. Cuz then I could say to my boss:

“If you would like to persist in holding your own views, and you stubbornly refuse to admit that my style of thinking is the only humane way (I AM the truth and the life, as John 14:6 says), especially with regard to this whole Russiagate fiasco, then au revoir sucker: goodbye, until we meet again. For in less than four decades you & I both will die and meet God, because our mutual good deeds will undoubtedly land us in heaven, and, on that day, God will prove to you in person that I was right all along. You can ask him directly & say: ‘Dear God, remember that Saturday in 2019 when Bryan said that the same intelligence agencies that lied the U.S. populace into the international crime against Iraq are now using the same techniques to lie us into conflict with Russia (not to mention Venezuela [& Iran])? Was he correct about that assertion? Cuz I think that he was just bloviating hot air — I mean, look: he’s Bryan Ray, the Nazarene, born in Poplar, Wisconsin. He’s never had a proper haircut in his life; for, in this hair·style·less·ness lies his success. And what good has ever come out of that little town in Wisconsin? The kid was born in a horsetrough, for Christ’s sake!’ And God will answer you to your face: ‘My grandson Bryan was right about this one matter. He did his homework; give him credit.’ And then fire and smoke will spue from God’s blowhole.”

The reason that I’d be able to say all this to my boss is that I’d know that my needs in life are basically secure; in other words, I’m not impelled by the threat of disease or the potential of homelessness to write shoddy articles for his company’s e-zine (electronic magazine), which claims that it’s for leftists but has been moving steadily rightward all along.

On a brighter note, two books that I’m really excited about arrived in the mail just this instant. One is called POSSESSED BY MEMORY: the Inward Light of Criticism by Harold Bloom; and the other is Max Blumenthal’s THE MANAGEMENT OF SAVAGERY: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump. I now open Max’s book, since it was packaged at the top of the shipping box, and the very first thing I see is a quote (one of three that serve as the volume’s epigraph) with the attribution “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to the House Appropriations Committee, April 23, 2009”:

Let’s remember here, the people we are fighting today, we funded twenty years ago, and we did it because we were locked in this struggle with the Soviet Union … There’s a very strong argument, which is: it wasn’t a bad investment to end the Soviet Union, but let’s be careful what we sow because we will harvest.

I just wanna underline that phrase “it wasn’t a bad investment to end the Soviet Union”. Imagine being a part of a group who thinks of ending sovereign nations not only as an option but as an investment. End a country?—I can’t even end a BLOG POST (look at this entry that I’m writing here). How could you “end” a vast nation and not at least feel a little bit guilty after doing so? The very first nightmare I ever remember experiencing is a dream I had when I was a toddler:

I was sitting with my brother Paul at the kitchen table (he was my only sibling at the time: my sister wasn’t born yet) and we were playing with clay, as was our wont. Then, on a whim, I put down the clay & decided instead to reach over & take up my brother himself in my hands, and I began to mold him, just like the clay that we had been fashioning; and I rolled poor Paul up into a ball, and I kept compressing the Paul-ball tighter and tighter (I resented my brother, back then: I wanted to be the only child), and I pressed and rolled him up until Paul disappeared.

So it was just like Cain and Abel: In my dream, I killed my brother.

It was also like the reverse of God’s creation of Adam; for, lo: God took clay from the ground and fashioned it into a self-portrait (this story is told in the second chapter of Genesis); then God blew into the statue’s nostrils, and the thing came alive. Whereas I, even I, took the living human being who was my brother and squished him back into earth-clay-dust.

My point in telling you this is to emphasize how horrible I felt after experiencing that dream. I awoke immediately after squashing Paul down to oblivion, & I cried & cried, alone in my bed at night; & I vowed to myself that I’d never annihilate Paul in real life. Killing is too much responsibility: I recall feeling, during that split-second of dream-time (before I awoke) when I grasped the truth that Paul was in fact eliminated, that now it was incumbent upon ME ALONE to prove as good as two distinguished lads. That’s overloading the shoulders of a toddler.

So anyway, that’s why I hate birdsong, and why I’m happy that my book order finally arrived, and why ducks should get their avian license removed and be considered a separate obscenity, and why I’m right about Russia.